This reactionary and neo-Confederate return to racial stigmatization and hatred is not going to end well.
Regressing to the Color of Our Skin
Until about 2008, it was generally believed America had made great strides in rendering race incidental rather than essential to our characters. We were moving away from the racial collective of our past to the individual. That was the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., who emphasized content of character over color of skin.
Barack Obama’s presidency, however, resurrected tribal identity politics. He rebooted the banal word “diversity” and made it synonymous with anyone and anything “nonwhite.” ...
As a result, rich Punjabi immigrants, Korean-American orthodontists, Obama himself, or Oprah Winfrey (the victim, supposedly, of being denied a look at a $38,000 crocodile skin bag) all supposedly shared some sort of oppressed solidarity by virtue of not being completely white.
But if the well-off mysteriously could become victims, stranger still, millions of the poor could be reinvented as white victimizers.
In this new fixation on “white rage,” “white supremacy,” and “white privilege,” a white Mark Zuckerberg, Jane Fonda, a long-haul truck-driver, or an Alabama janitor all can be jumbled together as the oppressors of the likes of Jussie Smollett, LeBron James, Sonya Sotomayor, or Elizabeth Warren—whose power, money, or influence did not negate their claims of being not fully white.
And:
So why wouldn’t a known racist firebrand like Brooks or Frank James, the racist subway shooter, believe that he was only acting out the thoughts of elites who were bragging about either shunning non-improved whites or playing at beheading them?
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